The PEN/New York Review panel discussion on the economy is online. I’ll outsource the discussion of what went down to Brad DeLong. Just this to add: it’s bad enough to have people resurrecting 75-year old fallacies about macroeconomics right in the middle of a crisis in which knowledge is our only defense against catastrophe. What’s really bad, however, is when they do so believing that these fallacies are deep insights that have somehow eluded those of us who have, you know, been studying these issues for a while, and saw some (not all) of this crisis in advance.

If you follow the link, you see that Krugman is referring to a panel discussion in which he was a participant. So he’s not talking about random people here, he’s talking about people he just had a discussion with! (Someone correct me if I’m misunderstanding what happened.)